Canadian writer Robert Kroetsch killed in car accident

Renowned Canadian writer Robert Kroetsch, whose award-winning novels and poetry collections are staples of university reading lists across the country, died in an automobile accident on Tuesday night. He was 84 years old.

According to a post on the University of Alberta Press‘ blog, Kroetsch was killed while returning from the Artspeak Festival in Canmore, Alberta: “On his return, coming through Drumheller and up Highway 21, another car T-boned the car Robert was in, on his side. Robert was killed and the other three occupants are in the hospital.” (The Afterword was subsequently told that only one other person was in the car Kroetsch was travelling in — the driver — and is currently in hospital).

“He’s the greatest writer that was ever born in Alberta and ever lived here,” said an emotional Rudy Wiebe, his close friend of 44 years and fellow writer, on the phone from Edmonton. “He wrote about this place no matter where he lived. He lived in the United States, he lived in Manitoba, he lived in the North of Canada for a long time, but he always wrote about Alberta … He was the quintessential writer of the Prairies, it seems to me.”

“Robert Kroetsch has probably done more for Alberta, and for Alberta writing, than any other person,” said the writer Aritha Van Herk in an interview with Alberta Prime Time earlier this year. “He’s won the Governor General’s Award, he’s won every literary prize that there is, but more important, I think, is the way that he chronicles the life of the average person in Alberta.”

A towering figure in the Western writing community, Kroetsch was born on June 26, 1927 in the small village of Heisler, Alberta. “The first time I thought about being a writer was Grade Four,” he said in a past interview. “I won a poetry writing contest, I remember that, about health. I didn’t keep the manuscript.”

After graduating from the University of Alberta, a series of odd jobs took him across Canada — from the banks of the Slave River in the Northwest Territories to the shores of the Hudson Bay to Goose Bay, Labrador. Afterward, he went to graduate school in Vermont, married an American girl, and began to write fiction. In an e-mail interview with January magazine in 1999, Kroetsch wrote “While in the States I began to remember and write about the North — my first novel, But We Are Exiles (about men on a riverboat on the Mackenzie), appeared, if I recall correctly, in l965. By then I was teaching at the State University of New York in Binghamton (I dearly loved the place), and somehow the “high culture” of the [American] Northeast fueled my recollections of the North.” During a long and distinguished career, Kroetsch published nine books of fiction — including The Studhorse Man, which won the Governor General’s Award for Fiction in 1969 — seven works of non-fiction and 14 collections of poetry, a form which he only turned to later in his career. His last book, Too Bad: Sketches Toward a Self-Portrait, was published in 2010.

Wiebe told Alberta Prime Time that Kroetsch “told us our stories — our kinds of stories — in a new kind of way. He told us our stories in that ironic, post-modern kind of way, where we have an intellectual grasp of what’s going on, but it’s a tall tale at the same time. And that was striking because that hadn’t been done before about Alberta.”

“Bob Kroetsch took the details of the rural Alberta world into which he was born and found a way of fictionalizing that kept the humour, magic, and wild essence of the place,” said fellow Alberta writer Fred Stenson in an e-mail to The Afterword. “A literary father to many of us, he was always at work on a great project of creative understanding; he listened to everyone in search of the gleams by which it advanced. He had the best manners of any person I have ever met.”

Kroetsch was named and Officer of the Order of Canada in 2004. Earlier this year received the Lieutenant Governor’s Alberta Distinguished Artist award, and, just two weeks ago, was awarded the Golden Pen Award for Lifetime Achievement by the Writers Guild of Alberta.

“I’ve quite often gone on record as saying that he was the best writer in Canada,” said George Bowering, former Poet Laureate of Canada, who first met Kroetsch when they both won the Governor General’s Literary Award in 1969.

“I remember one time what Frank Davey said: ‘Here us poets think we know so much. Then this guy who was a novelist decides to spend most of his time writing poetry, and he shows us stuff we didn’t even know.’ It was just amazing.”

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